Before Beta
by roxywritings
Summary: Four teens. Friendless loners and fanatics in their own way, they lived completely seperate lives together ... until the game. It's called Sburb, and it's chosen Rose, John, Dave and Jade to be its players. Set before Homestuck, this novella follows the four kids as they struggle with romance, friendship, and powers they've never before dreamed of. Now, there's no going back.


Like most things, Dave found it online. It was an accident, something he couldn't truthfully claim about all the other rather questionable things he had brought up on the internet. He had originally been on one of his bro's sites, trying to support the family business (semi-ironically), when an ad popped up.

He didn't even get a good look at it. He was trying to click the little _x_ in the corner that disabled ads for a grand total of two seconds before another one popped up. It would be a good two seconds, though. A good two seconds of uninterrupted puppets and their smooth felt rumps whose unimaginably voluptuous curves challenged even the most majestic mountain ranges. Although, he had thought on one occasion, it took three seconds just to pause the video and click the _x_, so it might not actually be worth it.

But this time, as a result of distraction or poor coordination he thought fourteen years on the internet had combated, he didn't click the _x_. He clicked the ad, by accident, his mouse off by a fraction of a millimeter.

And then a site opened up in his browser.

It was a change from the one he'd just been on, a rather clusterfucking hodgepodge of erotic plush figures of every color possible and even some that seemed quite impossible, set against a jumbled background of red, blue, yellow, orange and green (arranged in a pattern that, if asked, he couldn't identify, but, knowing his bro, the meaning not too ambiguous). Instead, this new site, assumedly some spam shit designed to steal his credit card information, was refreshingly stark. There was only one pop of color against the blindingly simple white backdrop: a logo, bright grass-green in hue, consisting of one word and some sort of house picture below it.

_Sburb_.

They couldn't even spell the damn word right. Some spammers. Dave almost laughed as he moved his mouse to exit, though he didn't actually laugh, just blew more air out of his nose than usual. It was something he had perfected after his thirteenth birthday. Cool Kids didn't actually laugh, after all. They just breathed. And, as he was surprised to learn, Cool Breathing took a lot of skill: if you didn't do it just right, you would end up sounding like someone trying to smoke for the first time, which wasn't even cool ironically.

He wasn't looking when he clicked. He thought he knew where his mouse was. No—he knew where his mouse was. He was David Strider, and fuck the world if he couldn't even exit the stupid site.

The world was fucked. He couldn't een exit the stupid site.

His aviators toppled down the bridge of his nose as he realized his cursor had moved down to the logo, the crappy little house thingamafucker. It was probably a glitch in his mouse. That had happened before. He just needed to slam it on the desk until the desk chipped (the mouse was too cool to chip, as his bro had told him when they were at the store) and something fell off his bottom shelf. Then he'd change the batteries and everything would be fine. But, as he raised the mouse, poised to kill, the screen changed.

Oh. Right. He'd actually clicked the thing, hadn't he?

He let the mouse clatter to the desk, not nearly hard enough to chip but enough to leave a measly dent, and hovered over his chair, wondering if he should call out for his bro. The last time he'd activated some scam site (not by accident but purposedly, last year, after remembering the time he didn't get to go to Sea World when he was six and having a river of anger surge within him, its waters released from the frozen winter of bad memory and triggered by a hot spring of recollection), he had done just that. His bro had disconnected the computer, stabbed the monitor with one of his sharpest swords, and thrown the CPU out the window of their twenty-one storey apartment,though not before logging off safely. His bro was good at computer stuff.

But Dave's mouth slowly closed when he saw what was happening on the screen. It had changed to a loading sign, with the puzzle pieces of the green house whirling in a sort of harmony, forming a flash that was almost lulling. Dave preferred the color red, of course, but he could dig green, too, on a good day.

_Sburb 99% loaded. Sburb 100% loaded_.

That was when he realized he had just downloaded a legitimate virus. And a virus probably warranted a much worse fate than a stab and a throw out the window. The blender, perhaps? He had one lying around.

His hands crept towards the katana he kept handy in his second drawer. Just in case.

Then, at one hundred percent, "Sburb" loaded. This was busier than the original, though still keeping with the theme of plain green-on-white. It wasn't a virus, he realized; or, at least, it was a very well disguised virus. He let his firm grip on the katana loosen, an imprint of his sweat-sheened fingers lingering on the blade's black-speckled platinum surface. It had seen its bad days. But it was trusty as hell, if hell was trusty.

As his shaded eyes swept over the rows of text on the site, though, Dave realized this was definitely not a shitconking spam attempt, nor a virus. It was a blog. A blog for a game.

"Sburb nominated Game of The Year," he murmured, reading the bolded headline, punctuated with more than several exclamation marks. It did not say, whoever, by who. Something Dave had picked up in his self-taught course on How to Fight Shitconking Spam Attempts on the Interwebs was that credible sources with links name-dropped and scattered throughout ensured a site's legitimacy. (His bro did that, but with a bunch of fake, unsourced names like the Texan Puppet Fetishizers Biweekly, which Dave had then started a site after in order to support his bro, but deleted because he couldn't afford a dot-com address on top of all his generous porn subscriptions. Of course, his bro didn't count in the ways of How to Fight Shitconking Spam Attempts on the Internet. If Dave wanted a legitimacy check, all he had to do was go across the hall.)

Reading on, he found a lot more unsourced praise. _Save the world_, one post egged. _And create a new one in the process!_ From what hegathered, it was some sort of RPG. He wasn't sure if he could get into that; semi-ironically, perhaps, if he had the time and patience. He was already busy with schoolwork and rapping. But mostly rapping. That was the legacy he'd carry into his next life. He personally didn't give a shit about math.

Some of it looked kinda cool, actually. He sifted through the archives until he found pictures, uncovering screenshots of meteor attacks and some sort of weird alchemic sciencefuckery. And some pretty cool shades.

Nowhere, though, did it have a "download" or "buy here" button, his half-thorough search proving quite useless. Nowhere. It was pretty bad marketing, if you asked Dave. What kind of hype site had no legitimate reviews (except a 5-star rating from some dude Vriska and another hearty 4.8 from someone with the equally ridiculous Russian-sounding name Karkat, and Dave didn't necessarily trust un-last-named Russian dudes) and no means whatsoever of _downloading_ the actual little fucker?

Then, like magic, or a fault in his mouse, the cursor shifted to a tiny gray strip of text at the very bottom of the webpage. _Get on the waiting list for Sburb Beta_, it urged, followed by space for him to put his email. Huh.

"Hey," his bro hollered from the other room.

"Coming," Dave shouted back, shutting off the computer. But not before bookmarking the Sburb website, its green house shit thing glowing at him ominously, giving him an unreadable smile. You know. Just in case.


End file.
